Farming…

In order to do some skill building and practice intricate piecing, I set out to tackle the Farmer’s Wife Quilt.

Farmer’s Wife Quilt by Laurie Aaron Hird

Laurie Aaron Hird wrote a book The Farmer’s Wife Sampler Quilt: Letters from 1920s Farm
Wives and the 111 Blocks They Inspired.

Amazon’s book description:

In 1922, The Farmer’s Wife magazine posed this question to their readers: “If you had a daughter of marriageable age, would you, in light of your own experience, have her marry a farmer?” The magazine at that time had 750,000 subscribers, and received over 7,000 letters. The best answers to this question are included in this book, along with the traditional quilt blocks they inspired.

There is a Yahoo group and a Flickr group dedicated to this quilt.

I really am not a fan of the country look, which may surprise you considering I quilt. There are a lot of blocks in this quilt that are very country. Particularly the basket blocks. BUT, so many blocks are just geometry and playing around with different shapes. I LOVE that aspect of quilting.

In hopes to keep my quilt from being too “country” I am using a modern color palette. Primarily, there will be jewel tones offset by whites and grays. Fabric choices tend to be difficult: the scales need to be small, so I am using a combination of small-scale prints and solids. In addition, I am not making all the blocks. All 111 blocks make a queen size quilt. I am just going to make all the blocks that I like and then figure out what size that makes. This is a far more lackadaisical approach than what I normally take. There is also NO timeline. Based on the intricacies of these blocks it would not take much to get burned out quickly. I tend to work on this between other projects that do have hard deadlines. Like Christmas gifts (that are ~~never~~ usually late anyway).

Following are some beautiful completed quilts.

This is probably my favorite. Susan used various traditional blocks in several sizes. The finished product is gorgeous!